Images by Terrell Manasco.Event images courtesy of Megan Bolton.From 1941 to 1945, almost six million human lives vanished forever from the face of the earth.Some were adults. Some were children. Some were burned alive. Some were shot. Some died in other ghastly, horrible, gruesome ways too graphic to mention.This year Yom Hashoah, a day inaugurated in 1953 by Israel, fell on May 5th. In 2016, the first week of May was designated nationwide as Holocaust Remembrance Week, to commemorate the approximately six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust as a result of the actions carried out by Nazi Germany and its accessories. As part of its yearly Holocaust Remembrance Program, Jacksonville State University recently hosted a writing competition for high school students. Three 8th graders from Lupton Junior High School took top honors. Megan Bolton, who teaches 7th and 8th grade English Language Arts at Lupton, explains the details of the competition.L-R: Austin Gilliland, Alayna Ivie, Josh Gardner, and Lupton English Language Arts teacher Megan Bolton.“As part of the program, Jacksonville State University installed a writing competition for middle school levels, and one for high school levels,” she says. “The true heart of this competition is raising awareness about human rights and dignity and learning how to overcome problems in the future by remembering the past. This year the focus was on short stories and poetry. They mail out information on the contest to students in Alabama and Georgia. The winners are recognized at the program, and the first place winners are invited to read excerpts from their works. We got to participate, and we had two first place winners in this group.”The three Lupton eighth graders were notified during Spring Break, and were recognized during the program held on April 5th at Jacksonville State University. Alayna Ivie won first place for her short story Firewood. Alayna says her story focuses on what happened to a fictional family during the Holocaust. “The main character is a boy, watching his father chopping firewood. The father leaves his axe in the wood when all the German soldiers come and take them out of their home,” she explains. The story ends when the family, now prisoners at a death camp, sees firewood stacked nearby with the father’s axe still in it and realize in horror that they are about to be burned alive by their own firewood.Austin Gilliland placed second for his short story Survivor. Austin says his story was also written from a young person’s point of view. “It’s about a boy and his family in the Holocaust and how ruthless the Germans were,” he explains.Josh Gardner won first place in the poetry category for his poem Earth. He says it also deals with tragic deaths but with a twist. “What the Germans would do when they took them to death camps was take them to a big place and have them dig up a large amount of land and then kill them, and make a bunch of them bury those people,” Josh says. “I did it so that one of them was part of the earth and the grass.”To give the students a deeper understanding of actually what happened during the Holocaust, the class watched videos and read the novel Night, the memoir by Elie Wiesel. 78To read more stories like this one, follow us on the 78 Facebook page.